CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Thia
Bear had lost his damned mind.
From the second we left the park he hadn’t been the same.
I knew he wanted me to walk in on him with that girl. It wasn’t what she was doing to him that both pissed me off and broke my heart. It was the fact that I knew he’d done it on purpose. He wanted to get caught.
He wanted to HURT me.
Even though I was free of the current I continued to row, wanting to get far enough away from the shore that Bear would give up on swimming and turn back around. As I got closer to the shore on the opposite side I’d thought I would see other houses surrounding the bay, but the rest of the shore was covered in a mixture of tall thin trees that bent and swayed with the slightest breeze and short stumpy mangroves that sat on top of the water on little sticks that reminded me of the pillars that held up King and Ray’s house.
I really hadn’t thought Bear was going to jump in. An empty threat that turned out to be not so empty.
The spot where Bear had jumped into the water created a rippling effect over the surface, growing larger and larger as it spanned out. By the time it reached the boat it had turned from slight ripple to little wave, rocking the boat from side to side.
That’s when I realized that there was no other disturbance in the water. No indication of movement of any kind.
Where is he? My anger and irritation temporarily replaced by worry.
I counted to ten.
Nothing.
I counted again.
Nothing.
“Bear!” I shouted.
No response.
Keeping one oar raised out of the water I turned the boat around and followed the path from where I came, scanning for signs of life. I’d only gotten a few strokes in when the stillness exploded beside the boat. My heart leapt into my stomach as Bear launched himself through the surface of the water like an orca, soaking my hair and clothes.
“Why do you care? Why are you really mad?” Bear asked, grabbing onto the side of the boat. “Tell me, Ti, and be fucking honest with me because we both know you can’t lie for shit. Why do you care if I fuck and snort and drink myself into an early fucking grave?” Fire danced in his eyes, water dripped into his face and mouth. “Tell me,” he challenged. “Right fucking now ’cause I need to know.” He lifted a leg over the side of the boat. I held onto the sides to prevent myself from going in as it tipped more sideways then I thought a boat could, letting in a few inches of water. Bear lifted his other leg into the boat and it righted itself again as he climbed in. With limited space he sat behind me on the little bench seat, my back to his chest. His knees splayed out on the side of my hips. I turned sideways to glare at him.
Bear was running a hand over his head, wringing out the access water.
He was also naked.
Completely and utterly, devastatingly and beautifully…naked.
I wanted to hate him and I was pretty sure I did but that didn’t mean that his mere presence didn’t affect me.
Under the light of the moon his tattoos and smooth skin looked as if they were shining, glowing with the same iridescent light reflecting off the water. His chest and arms flexed from the strain of his swim. His ab muscles rose and fell as he tried to catch his breath and I found myself following them where they turned into a V, pointing down to his…
I averted my gaze to the trees. “You win, Bear, whatever you are trying to argue. It’s fine. I agree. You win. Just go!”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t win. I fucked up, Ti. If this is winning I hate to find out what losing feels like, so please, tell me what it is you think I won?”
It was exactly what I wanted to hear.
It was exactly bullshit.
“You wanted to push me away,” I reminded him. “You wanted to hurt me. Mission accomplished. Now get out of my boat.”
“First off, this is my boat. I built it with King and Preppy when they first bought the place, so if anyone is getting out, it’s you. Second, I tried to push you away. I admit it, even convinced myself that I wanted to do it. I thought it would be better if you hated me. I thought you would be better if you hated me.” His eyes met mine. “And part of me still thinks that’s true. But nothing about the look on your face felt like I was doing the right thing. The reality of you hating me was nothing like I thought it would be.” His voice grew quiet and his words sank further into the barrier I had a hard time keeping up around him. “It gutted me, Ti.”
Don’t listen. He’s lying. Don’t believe him.
“I know the feeling,” I said, the words dripping with the bitterness I felt.
Don’t listen. He’s lying. Don’t believe him.
“Here I thought you were being an asshole, but really, you just couldn’t push her hand from your dick fast enough?” I snapped. “Makes total sense. Please, by all means, continue,” I said sarcastically, resting my chin on my closed fist and leaning toward him to hear the rest of his ridiculous lies. The breeze picked up blowing my hair over my shoulders. Bear reached over my shoulder and grazed the side of my neck with the back of his knuckles. I shivered as he pulled my hair back around, dragging his fingertips across my skin as he adjusted my hair across my back. “You don’t get to touch me.” I seethed, trying my hardest not to give away the desire coursing through me by leaning into his touch.
“I told myself I can’t have you, but I can’t shake you. Why do you think that is?” Bear asked, his words a whisper against my bare neck. His fingers continuing to dance down the back of my arms despite my protest.
A part of me wanted to turn around and crush my lips to his.
A part of me wanted to drown him in the bay.
I was lost in sensation as my skin prickled to life and a muscle inside of me spasmed out and clenched. It was a war. Desire vs. Anger.
Anger was losing, but I wasn’t ready to give up the fight so easily.
Or so I thought. I’d opened my mouth to argue, yet somehow my brain thought the words and my mouth delivered the message, but I wasn’t fully aware of what I was saying.
Of the truth.
“You can’t shake me because I love you, you fucking asshole,” I said. Instant regret and fear slammed into me and I considered jumping into the bay to avoid seeing Bear’s reaction.
His thighs tensed around me.
After what seemed like forever he finally spoke and my heart started to shatter all over again. “No, you can’t love me.”
“No?” I asked, feeling every bit of anger coming back with a vengeance, rage raced up toward my neck, my blood turning hot in my pulsing veins. “No? You really are an idiot then! You don’t get to tell me that. And newsflash: I’ve loved you since I first saw you when I was just a kid and I will love you until I’m a hundred years old and even after they bury me in the ground.” I turned in the seat and Bear shifted his leg to make room for my knees, which were dangerously close to his cock that I couldn’t help but notice was already hard, pulsing as we argued. “You don’t have the right to tell me not to, love doesn’t work like that. The way I feel about you is the one thing in my life I still have that’s completely mine, and believe it or not, even you can’t take that from me.” I grabbed the oars and tried to row back to shore but Bear locked his thighs around me so that I couldn’t turn back around. He grabbed the oars from me and tossed them overboard, one at a time, launching them like little javelins across the water.
“What the fuck!”
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Bear said, looking down into my eyes. Where there was irritation before was now only confusion. Pain. That’s when I realized it.
He’d told me that I couldn’t love him, not because he didn’t want my love.
But because he didn’t think he was worthy.
FUCK THIS. I grabbed his face in my hands and forced him closer to me. “You came into my life when I had nothing left.” I told him, putting everything I had out there for him to take in. I thought I’d feel weak telling him the truth but I didn’t. If anything I felt stronger with each new confession, finding strength in the truth. “You’ve been everything to me.” I leaned forward and planted a small soft kiss on the corner of his mouth, his lips parted and his gaze dropped to my lips as I pulled back. “You just have to remember how to be something to yourself.”
“I can’t,” Bear said, so quietly I wasn’t sure if he really spoke. “I can’t,” he repeated. His shoulders fell and his gaze dropped to the floor of the boat.
“Why? Tell me why?” I demanded, standing up off my seat. Bear was now eye level with my chest.
“I’m…lost,” he admitted, and my heart sank.
“Then I will help you find your way,” I said with new found determination, rubbing my thumbs over his temples. Bear leaned into my touch and closed his eyes, but it didn’t last long. Suddenly he pulled away.
“It’s not that easy. I’m a biker without a club. I feel like I’m nothing because I don’t know who I am anymore.” His brutal honesty should have had me skipping around in elation, finally cracking the hard shell that was Bear, but the happiness never came, because my heart was hurting for him.
Hurt quickly turned to anger.
“What do you want?” I asked. It came out a little harsher than I intended. He shook his head and remained silent. “Answer me, damn it!”
His eyes locked onto mine and I saw the second he fixed that shell back in place. “I want what every man wants, Ti. A bottle of Jack and my fucking dick sucked. You up for it, baby girl? Ready to wrap those beautiful lips of yours around my cock? Or should I bring that other chick back to get the job done? Or, maybe you want to join us? It’s the least you can do to make up for the earlier interruption.” Bear’s eyes glinted with a hint of evil, but I saw right past his lies to the pain lurking beneath the surface, beneath the facade he was so good at clinging to when he didn’t want to show his true feelings.
I slapped him across the face.
Hard.
His hands dug harshly into my hips and he jerked me toward him, the boat rocked violently. “Careful,” he warned.
“You can try and distract me by making me angry, but you can’t, it’s not going to work. Not this time. So tell me Bear,” I repeated my question. “What. Do. You. Want?” I was angry that the beautiful man in front of me couldn’t see what I saw in him.
“What I want isn’t important,” Bear said. He moved his hands around to my lower back and tugged me in closer. “I can’t have what I want.”
“Why not?”
“Because what I want is not fucking possible!” he said. “Tell me, Ti. You gonna bring my dead friend back? ’Cause Preppy died right in front of my eyes and I couldn’t save him! You gonna give me my club? I want things to be the way they were supposed to be before it all went to shit. You gonna take the nightmares away? The ones where I relive Eli and his men torturing me, shoving some broken bat up my ass and shoving their cocks in my mouth? Because I want all that and more than anything I want…” He looked away, but I wasn’t about to let him stop there. I brought his gaze back to mine and held it there.
“What? What else do you want?” I asked, softly this time. When he didn’t answer right away I was afraid I’d already lost him.
After an eternity he finally spoke and when he did his words knocked the wind from my chest. “You.” He finally admitted, his voice stronger, more assertive than just seconds before. “I’ve been a ruined man for a long time. I can’t ruin you too.”
“You didn’t ruin me,” I said. “You saved me.”
I didn’t even realize the boat had started to tip over until it was too late. I lost my hold on Bear and crashed into the dark water.
Bear’s strong arms lifted me out. “Grab onto the side,” he said, tapping on the side of the boat. I couldn’t reach the ground but Bear could because he held onto the boat and walked us toward the nearby shore. I was so wrapped up in Bear that I hadn’t noticed how close we’d floated. King and Ray’s house looked so small from across the bay. Lights flickered in the windows. It seemed a million miles away, not just a few hundred feet.
Suddenly I was airborne and in seconds I was flat on my back on a tiny muddy beach and Bear was on top of me. His lips crushing mine until I couldn’t breath, his hand palming my breast, his cock hard and ready between my legs.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said dropping his forehead to mine in a rare moment of vulnerability. His voice was rough and shaky. “Help me. Please. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“What are you trying to do?” I asked. He raised up, just enough to look me in the eye.
“I’m trying to love you.”
We were two tortured souls. Both in more ways than one person should ever have to experience.
But we found each other.
We needed each other.
So help him I did.
I sat up enough to pull him back down to me, the broken shells in the mud dug into my back. The water of the bay lapped over my bare feet. Bear was a million different things, and he may have been pushing thirty, but we were alike in so many ways. He was just a boy who had no clue what he was doing and I was just a girl who had no idea what to do with all the feelings I had swarming around inside of me.
I just knew that I wanted him.
That I loved him.
“Promise me that no matter what, that you won’t give up on me. Promise me, Ti,” Bear said, his eyes welling up with water. I wiped the corner of his eye with my thumb and he leaned into my touch.
“I won’t give up on you,” I promised and I meant it.
I would never give up on him.
Neither of us knew what the future held for us, if anything at all. All we knew is that we had today. Right then, right there. We were just a normal boy and a normal girl trying to figure out how to love one another.
Today.
Tomorrow we would figure out the rest.
Today, Bear pulled my shorts and panties to the side, sank his hard cock deep inside of me and frantically fucked me until I couldn’t think of anything but him, the orgasm that tore through my body, the tears that ran down my face, and the elation my heart felt over knowing that the stupid boy who made mistakes loved me.
And that was good enough.
For today.
Because tomorrow never came.